i believe so too. nobody reputable reported it. i looked at CME's tick data and there was no halt, no circuit breaker, no nothing. i think the author just saw the massive gap on sunday's open and assumed something was amiss. or they just had a bad data feed that went dead and didn't verify what happened.

this is great---very useful tool for anyone trying to stack sats in the altcoin market, which is all about timing.

i'd love to see a bit more granularity, eg "is it an altcoin week"? when alt season kicks in, it happens fast. i reckon 30-day/90-day averages might lag.

given where the 2013 and 2017 bubbles ended, you're not the first to propose this theory.

in fact, this is probably why bitcoin rocketed higher all through december---too many people sold expecting a december selloff. now they keep panic buying back in.

there is probably something to the june/december thing. june is typically fiscal year end, the start of summer, "sell in may and go away". december = holiday lull times, plus it's typically tax selling season. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tax_selling.asp

i wouldn't consider it a major factor. as we saw this year, when bull markets are really powerful, nothing can stop them.

how could it possibly be a negative for price? similar to GBTC, the ETF trust will need to accumulate coins from the spot market to back shares---bullish. institutional investors and retail investors alike will also have much easier (and in their minds, "safer" because regulation) access to the market---bullish. there are no doubt prospective investors who are still on the sidelines for fear of touching unregulated markets and unfamiliar exchanges. they're dinosaurs and they want liquid, regulated markets accessible through their preferred broker, and they also want assets they can easily hold in their mainstream retirement portfolios. that's a big market just waiting to be tapped.

here's my concern with where things are headed. coinbase is taking custody of like half of all new institutional investment. and they just bought xapo too, and surely there will be even more consolidation of the industry in the future. 5 or 10 years down the road, is coinbase just gonna have custody of like 5 million coins or something? more?

that just seems kinda scary to me.

there are lots of payment processors who can invoice your customers, take payment in BTC, and then transmit the fiat value to you, the merchant. bitpay, coingate, coinpayments, etc. you'll notice all these companies market their product as a way for merchants to accept BTC, not as a way for customers to pay in USD.

finding the reverse---a processor who can take payments in fiat and transmit the BTC to the merchant---is much more difficult, due to the high risk of fraud with fiat payment methods.

you could get a bitcoin debit card from coinbase, bitpay, etc. that would allow you to pay at lowes or home depot with bitcoins held in your debit card account. so that takes care of the spending angle. but again, getting bitcoins from your customers in the first place is the tricky part.

i'm sure the government hopes people spend the money on consumer goods and services. that's the whole point of direct stimulus---to stimulate the consumer economy, not to stimulate the hoarding of investment assets or cash.

still, there are no restrictions on what people can spend their stimulus checks on, so why would it matter? there's nothing illegal happening here.

in my case, $600 isn't worth that much thought---that's ~0.02 BTC. shrug. i have no specific plans for it.

the blockchain would grind to a halt. no new blocks would be produced. no new bitcoins would be mined. no transactions would be confirmed.

this has happened before with dead altcoins. miners can come back online at any time and pick up where they left off, even years later, but until/unless that happens the blockchain just sits in stasis.

i assume you didn't actually post the full algorithm publicly?

if it's just privately written down/stored, then it's just an encrypted seed---not the best encryption, but no one who finds it will instantly be able to break it.

keep in mind however, that for anyone remotely sophisticated who is able to take time brute forcing, there are only "millions" of possible combinations. that's not secure at all. i wouldn't consider it sufficiently encrypted to store publicly. it's a lot better than storing a seed in plain text though.

there isn't some static permanently available amount of OTC bitcoins for sale. if a few investors buy up all the available coins on the OTC market (as grayscale, square, paypal, microstrategy, etc have been doing all quarter) then OTC demand will spill over onto exchanges and literally push prices up.

in fact, coinbase reported that microstrategy's orders were too large to handle OTC---they were also sourcing coins directly from exchanges. https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-helping-corporate-companies-diversify-with-crypto-444e8d91ebca

this is how institutions push price up. they use brokers who find liquidity at the best possible price, whether that comes from OTC desks, market makers, exchanges, or whatever.

ah, frances coppola. of course she's trolling us now that bitcoin is back at ATHs. as a QE-loving keynesian, her hatred of bitcoin runs deep---to the point of irrationality, apparently.


0.00000001 BTC is the same as 0.0000000100 BTC. nothing is being diluted.

was dividing BTC into bitcents and mBTC also a form of inflation?

i agree, and i reckon that's why there is an exemption for publicly listed securities. the regs obviously weren't written with bitcoin in mind. i'd like to think that exemption will eventually be expanded to include cryptocurrencies, though i wouldn't hold my breath.

considering the detail required on form 8283 and the legal liability they are taking on, i'm curious---what do you think a fair price would be?

you're in the states, right? before you do anything else---do you have a REAL ID? if not, don't bother. they won't verify you.


gemini does mention mixing/tumbling in their terms. it probably depends how your coins were mixed. there have been multiple public instances where coinjoins got peoples' accounts flagged at other exchanges---not so much for centralized mixers.

gemini doesn't tell people why their accounts are being closed, they just close them, so it's hard to say with any certainty how they approach the issue.


i'm not sure but according to their "contact us" page, you can open a ticket, call them, or DM on twitter for support. https://support.gemini.com/hc/en-us/articles/204732835-Contact-us


it has to do with this: https://www.gemini.com/legal/user-agreement#section-source-of-funds

basically, they wanna cover their ass and make sure you aren't using illegally obtained funds or funds that aren't yours. they don't wanna be used as a money laundering instrument, or facilitate money transmission on behalf of anyone else but you.

if they don't like your answers or you exhibit some account activity they deem risky, i reckon they will close your account.

it's irrelevant to bitcoin IMO. the SEC is only making making that argument to preempt ripple's claim that XRP could be deemed a "currency" under federal securities laws.

regardless of how the SEC defines "currency", bitcoin is almost certainly not a security, for other reasons.

$120 for a single donation (https://cryptoappraisers.com) isn't ridiculous---that's significantly less than 1 hour of billed time from a competent CPA. considering you're avoiding any capital gains taxes and also deducting the entire amount of the donation, $120 seems like an afterthought, especially if you're donating higher amounts.

gifting long term capital gain property = extremely lucrative tax breaks. if they just allowed large untaxed noncash donations without any documentation, that could be abused left and right, so they put the onus on the taxpayer to prove it.

can anyone clarify---is the reporting threshold in the proposed law $3000 per day, as stated here? because i also see mention of this in FINCEN's original notice:


the coindesk article does go onto say, "[The controversial rule] originally was thought to be far more stringent than the final version published last week."

but i can't help but wonder if there is an important distinction being missed here. wtf is this about "international transactions"?

$3k ain't that bad. $250 scares the shit outta me.

he called it a "savings & loan" to give it an air of legitimacy, but it was just a ponzi scheme.

i'm still partial to the crypto capital comparison. if you dig into its origin, it all comes back to this reddit post: https://web.archive.org/web/20130515000701/http://www.reddit.com:80/r/Bitcoin/comments/1dmjyg/bitcoin_from_a_banker_prospective_a_serious/

......which reads just like the OP. basically:


i love the idea but in practice, it didn't work out so well: President of Crypto Capital arrested in alleged money laundering operation

i'd rather hodl my coins than risk them investing in something like that!

that was the entire idea behind crypto capital---a crypto-friendly financial institution that worked seamlessly with exchanges. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/crypto-capital

unfortunately the rest of the banking world (probably under pressure from regulators) started treating them like a pariah, and they had a harder and harder time moving money to service their customers. that forced them into risky banking relationships where they were rubbing elbows with drug cartels, which eventually resulted in massive bank account seizures and police charges.

in fact, those bank seizures are literally why tether is not 1:1 backed anymore---that goes to how serious this is.

if "crypto-friendly bank" is code for "not compliant with banking/AML laws" then it's not a sustainable solution. regulators and police agencies will just take them down, which will cause lots of collateral damage for partner exchanges.

and if they are fully compliant, then what is it a solution for?

hmmm, ok. when you said CFD the first thing that popped into my head was "liquidity problems" because the point of CFDs is to offer access to high leverage exposure to the underlying asset in a segregated (low liquidity) market. paypal should not have any such liquidity problems if they are fully backed and source their coins from the spot and OTC markets.

you were saying the SEC would be forced to acquiesce on an ETF because such instruments are dangerous, but what makes an ETF fundamentally more safe? just because it would have SEC oversight rather than NYDFS oversight?


but it would only be selling pressure on GBTC, not the spot market. just like there is huge buying pressure now and that has created a big premium, huge selling pressure would destroy that premium, or even create a discount.

what i'm talking about is akin to flashing wads of cash in public, where less savory opportunists might notice and come after you. this is why i wouldn't wanna bust out a hardware wallet in a retail setting, show it off in public, etc.

a home invasion is a targeted attack. that's some next level shit. i don't think anyone is targeting me for a home invasion just because i own a cheap netbook! call me paranoid, but announcing yourself as a dedicated crypto investor in public with a ledger or trezor---that may be a different story.

and that's the distinction i'm making---it's not really about hardware wallet vs other security models like airgapping a PC. if you use a hardware wallet only online in your own home, then what i'm saying doesn't apply.

the cost of security (represented as demand for block space) is always gonna be priced in. if other people are willing to pay for bitcoin's POW and you can't afford it (or low value tx simply don't justify it) then use an altcoin (lower security, lower fees) or a second layer network like LN.

it's a free market. we all need to make trade offs. nobody should be paying the cost of a cup of coffee just to buy a cup of coffee. but if you hold value in a lesser altcoin, the chance of the coins you received being double spent is non-zero. there are ways you can lose money on LN too.

fundamentally, that's the trade-off. bitcoin's security is top notch, but it comes at a cost that too many people are willing to pay. if you don't wanna outbid them, you can opt for a weaker security model.


that's not something i'm concerned about, given the existing block weight limit. there is constant demand.